Pemartin, Maria

Abstract [en]

Innovation process has been widely studied in the business environments and it is really important to the competitiveness and survival of firms. Besides, in a global context, where product innovation has become increasingly more challenging, SMEs are even more dependent on external resources because the process of NPD is becoming more complex. According to resource based view, firms capabilities can be viewed as the glue that binds together all the resources and enables them to be deployed advantageously (Walter et al., 2006). In this context, the main purpose of this research is to examine how networking and ICT capabilities influence small firm innovativeness and firm performance. The analysis is based on 291 small Swedish firms. The results show that small innovative firms have a better performance. Both capabilities have a positive direct impact on small firm innovativeness, but just networking capability has a direct and positive influence on firm performance